Subverting Nkrumah: the Information Research Department and the practice of neo-colonialism

This article traces the authoritarian tactics and strategies of the British state in the historical context of decolonisation in Britain’s African empire, with a specific focus on Ghana. It brings to light understudied histories of the British ‘secret state’s’ covert operations in Cold War Africa through a focus on the UK Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD). Operational from 1948 to 1977, this secret department waged disruption campaigns and psychological warfare operations across the globe, with the founding remit of opposing Soviet Communist subversion. IRD’s operations, though, would come to encompass undermining foreign governments and political movements that were deemed ‘threatening’ to British interests more broadly. It is important to note that IRD operated domestically in Britain simultaneously with such foreign interventions. In the vein of scholars such as Adam Elliot-Cooper, it sees the subversive tactics of imperial management and neo-colonial manipulation as emerging through various circulations of knowledge, personnel and techniques from the imperial metropole to the (neo)colony. Such an analysis provides important context for understanding current authoritarian practices of the British state that echo IRD’s historical operations. This is not in the mode of an imperial ‘blowback’ but an interrogation of longstanding historical trajectories that are routed through and inflected by experiences in Ghana, the IRD offices in Whitehall and places between.